Podcast

Sea Control 160 – Exercise Sea Dragon with Von Lambert and Tyler Quinn

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By Jared Samuelson

The Australian Army’s Von Lambert and USMC’s Tyler Quinn (@tc_quinn07) discuss their January article for War on the Rocks, to include what they learned about themselves, the value of experiential learning, and what it is like to transition from a lifetime of real-life COIN operations to confronting a peer competitor in the Marines’ competitive wargaming tournament, Exercise Sea Dragon.

Sea Control 160 – Exercise Sea Dragon with Von Lambert and Tyler Quinn

Links

6. Destination Unknown Volume 1 a project of the Brute Krulak Center for Innovation and Creativity (@TheKrulakCenter) and Ender’s Galley (@endersgalley).

Jared Samuelson is the Senior Producer for the Sea Control Podcast. Contact him at Seacontrol@cimsec.org.

Indo-Asia-Pacific

The Raisina Dialogues: Naval Convergence in the Indo-Pacific

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By David Scott

The annual Raisina Dialogue, hosted by India since 2016, is useful for highlighting the process of maritime strategic convergence between Australia, France, India, Japan, the U.K., and the U.S. The Raisina Dialogue was initially set up by India as a high-level forum for international discussion. Tellingly, Chinese officials have never been invited. For the last three years, from 2018 to 2020, there were panels specifically dealing with the Indo-Pacific that brought together naval leaders from various China-concerned countries. This built on the 2016 and 2017 iterations which brought keynote speeches and warnings from the U.S. naval leadership, alongside a maritime focus from Japan, India, and the U.K. What follows is a review of each year of the Raisina Dialogues, with a focus on the growing scope of collaboration between nations increasingly concerned about China’s Indo-Pacific push.

2016: Opening Talks

This was the first Raisina Dialogue, held from 1–3 March, with a focus on Asian connectivity. One of the participants was Admiral Harry Harris, chief of U.S. Pacific Command (PACOM), complete with his emphasis that:

“The United States is conducting our strategic Rebalance west to the Indo-Asia-Pacific. You need look no further than last October’s Malabar maritime exercise between India, Japan and the United States to see the security inter-connectedness of the Indian Ocean, Asia, and the Pacific Ocean regions.”

It was significant that he highlighted the strategic unity of both oceans, that he pinpointed America’s own transfer of resources across to the Indo-Pacific, and that he further pinpointed the emergent trilateral maritime partnership between India, Japan, and the U.S. The Malabar exercises had been bilateral India-U.S. affairs since 1992, but Japan was invited as a permanent participant in the October 2015 iteration and thereafter.

Two contextual programs starting in 2015 were China’s creation of artificial islands in the South China Sea (running through the next few years), and PACOM’s initiation of Freedom of Navigation Operations (FONOPs) around such artificial militarized creations of China, the tempo of which have been increased since 2017 under the Trump administration.

2017: Marine Geography of the Indo-Pacific

In 2017, no specific maritime panel was held at the Raisina Dialogue held on 17–19 January. Nevertheless strong maritime messages were prominent. Prime Minister Modi’s formal address pinpointed that with India “being a maritime nation, in all directions, our maritime interests are strategic and significant”; for which “we believe that respecting freedom of navigation and adhering to international norms is essential for peace and economic growth in the larger and inter-linked marine geography of the Indo-Pacific.” India’s chief of the Western Naval Command Vice Admiral Girish Luthra in a panel on “Evolving Politics of the Asia-Pacific” noted that “the regional order in Indo-Pacific is in transition, particularly in East Asia,” with veiled comments about the “economic blandishments” posed by China’s Maritime Silk Route (MSR) propositions announced by President Xi Jinping in October 2016.

Japan’s Parliamentary Vice-Minister for Foreign Affairs Shunsuke Takei, pinpointed further maritime issues at the 2017 Raisina Dialogue:

“In recent years, we have been witnessing scenes of increasing tensions between States, in the seas of Asia… Absence of the rule of law means giving way to dominance by force. To ensure open and stable seas and freedom of navigation and overflight, Japan underscores the importance of the observation of international law, including United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), which is the ‘constitution of the oceans.’ Concrete actions and cooperation based on such a universal law are needed.”

Concrete actions and concrete cooperation, particularly to uphold freedom of navigation, was aimed at China in the South China Sea, and was a call for essentially naval cooperation. The reiteration of the importance of UNCLOS was aimed at China’s rejection of the Permanent Court of Arbitration (PCA) ruling against it in various South China Sea UNCLOS issues in July 2016.

Finally, Admiral Harry Harris, PACOM chief, in a keynote speech welcomed the developing maritime cooperation between India and the U.S, witnessed in the ever strengthening Malabar exercises. He looked forward to ongoing trilateral India-Japan-U.S. maritime cooperation. China was discernible in his analysis:

“No matter how many bases are built on artificial features in the South China Sea, I say this often but it’s worth repeating: we will cooperate where we can, and be ready to confront where we must… There are those who question the motives for the increasingly cooperative relationship between the U.S. and India. They say that it’s to balance against and contain China. That’s just simply not true. Our relationship stands on its own merits.”

The first point was a direct denunciation of China’s artificial islands created in the South China Sea (the “Great Wall of Sand”) process of pouring sand and concrete onto semi-submerged reefs and atolls, and their subsequent militarization of harbors, airstrips, and missile batteries. The second point was diplomatic to the point of masking. The U.S. and India had various shared interests (democracy, economics, anti-terrorism) but rising concern about China was one important factor in their strategic convergence, even if unstated.

The then-U.K. Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson was able to announce at the 2017 Raisina Dialogue that “we have just decided to restore our military presence east of Suez,” where “as our naval strength increases in the next ten years, including two new aircraft carriers, we will be able to make a bigger contribution,” including “in the Indian Ocean, we have a joint U.K.-U.S. facility on Diego Garcia – an asset that is vital for our operations in the region” and that “we oppose the militarisation of the South China Sea and we urge all parties to respect freedom of navigation and settle their disputes peacefully in accordance with international law.”

2018: Uncharted Waters: In Search of Order in the Indo-Pacific

The 2018 Raisina Dialogue, held on 14–16 January, witnessed new developments: (a) a formal Indo-Pacific panel titled “Uncharted Waters: In search of Order in the Indo-Pacific”; (b) made up of naval chiefs from the U.S. (PACOM chief, Admiral Harry Harris), India (Chief of Naval Staff, Admiral Sunil Lanba), Australia (Vice Admiral Tim Barrett, Chief of Navy), and Japan (Chief of Joint Staff, Admiral Katsutoshi Kawano). Harris, having given relatively muted warnings in 2016 and 2017 at the Raisina Dialogue, was more explicit at the 2018 Dialogue, arguing that “the reality is that China is a disruptive transitional force in the Indo-Pacific. They are the owners of trust deficit.” Kawano was equally pointed, that “China’s military power is becoming more powerful and is expanding. In the East and South China Seas, China has been ignoring international law. In order to deter Chinese provocations, India, the U.S., Australia and Japan have to cooperate with one another.” Lanba focused on Chinese appearance in the Indian Ocean, particularly at Djibouti and Sri Lanka. Chinese state media was dismissive of the process, with the Global Times (25 January) running articles headlined “New Delhi forum props up ‘Quad’ stance, refuses to listen to China voice.”

2019: Indo-Pacific – Ancient Waters and Emerging Geometries

The 2019 Raisina Dialogue, held from 8–10 January, reflected another twist on strategic geometries as France joined the Quad partners. Consequently, military leaders from Australia (General Angus Campbell, Chief of the Defence Force), France (Admiral Christophe Prazuk, Chief of Naval Staff), India (Admiral Sunil Lamba, Chief of Naval Staff), Japan (Admiral Katsutoshi Kawano, Chief of Staff, Joint Staff), and the U.S. (Indo-Pacific Command, Admiral Phil Davidson) in the Panel entitled “Indo-Pacific: Ancient Waters and Emerging Geometries.” The official report on their discussion was that it “was all about China’s growing naval profile in the Indo-Pacific region.” Davidson made a point of noting how “the United States was working with Japan, France, New Zealand, Canada, the United Kingdom and others in the South China Sea”; and in a nod to fellow panelists noted that that the rules-based order in the Indo-Pacific had been “been underwritten in many respects, by the combat credibility of not only the United States forces, but the forces represented here on the panel. I think that’s incredibly important to sustain as we move forward.” Lanba noted that the Quad between Australia, India, Japan and the U.S. was “a growing relationship, which is robust. It will only grow as time goes by.”

March 2019 witnessed trilateral exercises between Japan, the U.K. and the U.S. in the West Pacific. April witnessed quadrilateral exercising between Australia, France, Japan and the U.S. in the Bay of Bengal; and May witnessed exercising between Australia, India, Japan, and the U.S. in the South China Sea.

During 2018, Australian vessels, HMAS Anzac, HMAS Toowoomba and HMAS Success had been challenged by the Chinese Navy in April 2018 when sailing through the South China Sea, i.e. across China’s 9-dash line. Australia’s Prime Minister, Malcolm Turnbull reiterated that Australia would keep deploying under its “right of freedom of navigation.” Similarly the French Defence Minister Florence Parly at the Shangri-La Dialogue in June 2018 had noted continued pressure by China on French ships sailing into Chinese-claimed territorial waters, which France considered international waters. In September the UK’s HMS Albion was in some confrontation with the Chinese navy over its freedom of navigation operation around the Paracels. Macron’s visit to Australia and the Pacific had brought his invocation of an “Indo-Pacific axis” (axe Indo-Pacifique) involving France, Australia, Japan, and India. 

2020: Fluid Fleets: Navigating Tides of Revision in the Indo-Pacific

The 2020 Raisina Dialogue, held on 14–16 January included a panel titled “Fluid Fleets: Navigating Tides of Revision in the Indo-Pacific.” The panel discussion drew together five military leaders from India (Chief of Naval Staff, Karambir Singh), Australia (Vice Chief of the Defence Force, Vice Admiral David Johnston), Japan (Chief of Staff, General Koji Yamazaki), France (Deputy Director of Strategy at the French Ministry of the Armed Forces, Luc de Rancourt) and the UK (Chief of Naval Staff, Admiral Tony Radakin). This represented a clear example of what the conference booklet described as “new strategic geographies from the Indo-Pacific.”

A China shadow was palpably present at the 2020 Raisina Dialogue, with China “looming large” according to the South China Morning Post; and where the Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov denounced the U.S. Indo-Pacific strategy as a divisive U.S. plot to “contain China.” The panel subtitle title “tides of revision” would seem perhaps implicitly coined with China in mind.

At the 2020 panel discussion, India’s Admiral Singh noted of China that “they have 7 –8 warships in the Indian Ocean at any given time […] We are watching. If anything impinges on us, we will act”; to which he gave the example of the Indian Navy escorting Chinese ships out of their sensitive Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) around the Andaman and Nicobar islands in December 2019. France’s Luc de Rancourt stated “we see China rising. We are seeing what it can do in South China Sea,” and reiterated French readiness to conduct freedom of navigation exercising there. Rancourt also spoke about “the importance of working together to promote a free, secure and open Indo-Pacific with our partners from the region with whom we share common values.” Japan’s Admiral Yamazaki admitted that “we are closely watching the situation” with regard to possible war between China and Japan. The U.K.’s Radakin announced a “greater role” for the U.K. in the Indo-Pacific, specifically including greater use of Diego Garcia. This was the notionally joint base between the U.K. and U.S., but mostly used by the U.S.; facing increasing U.N. pressure in 2019 with the advisory vote by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in February and the non-binding General Assembly vote in May calling for U.K. decolonization.

The context for the “fluid fleets” was three-fold, China’s aircraft carrier program, and local responses by Japan, at a time of re-emerging U.K. capability. All three states will have doubled their aircraft carrier capability in short order. This will put them into the elite class (or rather for the U.K., re-enter her into the class) of countries able to field aircraft carriers.

With regard to China, the key event was the commissioning of China’s second aircraft carrier, the Shandong, in December 2019 – an event attended by President Xi Jinping. This is a medium-sized aircraft carrier, displacing around 55,000 tons, and set to carry around 36 J-15 fighter jets. Homeported at Yulin Naval Base on Hainan island, the Shandong gives Chinese extra naval reach into the South China Sea and beyond. Commentary at the Peoples Daily was pointed, in that “the main strategic focus of the Shandong will be on waters around the South China Sea”; because “recently, military vessels and aircraft from some nations have been carrying out so-called freedom of navigation operations in the South China Sea, stirring up trouble and challenging China’s national sovereignty”; and that “the aircraft strike group headed by the Shandong will be deployed to the South China Sea. It is very likely that it will have face-to-face encounters with foreign military vessels.” Further deployment into the Indian Ocean will be more easily facilitated by this southern orientation. 

Chinese diplomats argued that “the Shandong aircraft carrier service illustrated not only the achievements of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army in the cause of [a] its modernization, but also [b] the firm stand in safeguarding China’s security and unity and [c] promoting world peace.” These points may have been true enough to China, but whether it represented a step in promoting world peace is questionable.

The Chinese military was exultant, “the commissioning of the new carrier marks a new height in China’s carrier development and is a major milestone in China’s warship construction history”; and that “deploying the new carrier in Sanya means it will play a critical role in safeguarding national maritime interests, as well as peace and stability in the South China Sea.” The Chinese state media argued that “this shows China’s comprehensive national strength, with a very high level of naval equipment and technologies applied.”

Nevertheless, some commentators were not impressed; the new aircraft carrier was a “paper tiger” according to David Axe; being little more than a copied version of the Soviet period design of China’s first aircraft carrier the Liaoning, brought from the Ukraine and commissioned in 2017 for training purposes. Indeed China may now be pulling back its planned aircraft carrier program. In December 2019, citing technical issues and a slowing economy, China reportedly put on hold plans for a fifth and possibly sixth carrier. Instead of speeding ahead with the development of a six-carrier fleet – two each for the northern, eastern and southern fleets – the Chinese Navy could stop after acquiring its fourth flattop. Here, while the envisaged third and fourth carriers reportedly will have catapults, allowing them to launch heavier planes, Beijing’s long-term ambition to develop nuclear-powered flattops seems on hold. While China may have ongoing problems catching up with U.S. aircraft carrier strength (11 nuclear flat-top carriers and nine usable further carriers), at the local level China’s naval program threatens to overshadow Japan and India.

With regard to Japan, on 30 December 2019 the Japanese Ministry of Defense approved the 2020 budget that will finance the refurbishment, i.e. the conversion, of the Izumo-class helicopter carriers for fixed wing F-35B stealth fighter operations; for which 42 are being purchased. The context is of course China’s push for aircraft carrier capability; where Japan’s two carriers are on the smaller side at 27,000 tons, but will have more powerful aircraft capabilities of fifth generation F-35Bs versus fourth generation J-15s. The decision in principle had been taken in December 2018, and now is being implemented. Deployment areas will include the South China Sea and Indian Ocean where the two carriers have already deployed, including JDS Kaga in 2018 and JDS Izumo 2019.

Finally with regard to the U.K., it commissioned its second aircraft carrier, the HMS Prince of Wales, in December 2019. It has a displacement of 72,000 tons, and is due to carry 24 F-35Bs by 2024. Simultaneously her sister ship the HMS Queen Elizabeth, commissioned in December 2017 with similar specifications, left Portsmouth for air trials with UK fighters in January 2020. What these two events show is that the gap in U.K. carrier capability is being filled. With full operational capability being completed in 2020, the way is becoming clear for aircraft carrier group deployment centered around the Queen Elizabeth in the Indian Ocean and Western Pacific in early 2021, with much speculation over whether this will include a U.K. deployment into the South China Sea.

During 2019 there was renewed determination by these countries to operate in the South China Sea. As the French Defence Minister Florence Parly noted at the Shangri-La Dialogue in July 2019, “we will continue to sail more than twice a year in the South China Sea. There will be objections, there will be dubious manoeuvres at sea” from China; “but we will not be intimidated into accepting any fait accompli, because what international law condemns, how could we condone? We will also call for all those who share this view to join in.” The “emerging geometries” noted in January at the 2019 Raisina Dialogue had been manifest during 2019 in various joint exercising.

Conclusion

The Raisina process has moved from bilateral U.S.-India maritime cooperation, to trilateral India-Japan-U.S. cooperation, to still wider Australia-India-France-Japan-U.K.-U.S. focus on maritime cooperation in the Indo-Pacific. Throughout this process, there remained a tangible rising concern about China’s growing challenge to the region. The Raisina process reflects this maritime strategic convergence, but also affects the process through reinforcing and strengthening a convergence of views. Such flexible patterns of Indo-Pacific naval cooperation mirror the political cooperation between these like-minded Indo-Pacific maritime actors.

David Scott is an Indo-Pacific analyst for the NATO Defense College Foundation, and a regular lecturer at the NATO Defense College. A prolific writer on maritime geopolitics, he can be contacted at davidscott366@outlook.com.

Featured Image: Commander, U.S. Indo-Pacific Command (USINDOPACOM) Adm. Phil Davidson, answers questions during a panel discussion, 9 Jan. 2018, at the Raisina Dialogue in New Delhi.  (Photo by Petty Officer 1st Class Robin Pe)

Podcast

Sea Control 159 – All Things Merchant Marine with Dr. Sal Mercogliano

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By Jared Samuelson

Legendary merchant marine scholar Dr. Sal Mercogliano (@mercoglianos) joins Jared Samuelson (@jwsc03) to discuss the state of the U.S. merchant marine, make historical comparisons to the pre-World War I fleet, and discuss last year’s Turbo Activation Exercise and Defender 2020. Also, my daughter makes an appearance shrieking in the background: SHE DOESN’T LIKE BEANS!

Download Sea Control 159 – All Things Merchant Marine with Dr. Sal Mercogliano

Links

The Collected Works of Dr. Sal Mercogliano

“To be a Modern Maritime Power,” USNI Proceedings, August 2019.

“Suppose There Was a War and the Merchant Marine Didn’t Come?” USNI Proceedings, January 2020. CNO Naval History Essay Contest Second Prize, Professional Historian Category.

“A Century of the Jones Act,” Sea History.

“‘We Built Her to Bring Them Over There’: The Cruiser and Transport Force in the Great War,” Sea History.

“The Shipping Act of 1916 and Emergency Fleet Corporation: America Builds, Requisitions, and Seizes a Merchant Fleet Second to None.”

The Fourth Arm of Defense: Sealift and Maritime Logistics in the Vietnam War. Naval History and Heritage Command, 2017.

“Op-Ed: the Merchant Marine, America’s fourth arm of defense,” Navy Times, May 14, 2019. 

“Turbo Activation – A Sealift Surge, or just a Trickle?” gCaptain, December 31, 2019. 

“Why the United States Needs a Merchant Marine – A Historical Basis,” gCaptain, October 23, 2018.

“Space Force, How About a Maritime Force?” gCaptain, July 27, 2018. 

Jared Samuelson is the Senior Producer of the Sea Control podcast. Contact him at Seacontrol@cimsec.org.

Interviews

A Conversation with Trip Barber on Fleet Design, Budget Analysis, and Future Warfighting

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By Dmitry Filipoff

Capt. Arthur “Trip” Barber (ret.) served in the Navy for 41 years, ultimately capping his career in the civilian Senior Executive Service as the Navy’s Chief Analyst for the last 12 of those years. In this wide-ranging and candid conversation, Barber discusses major challenges with ongoing force structure assessments, how he helped lead the Navy’s Assessment Division (N81) in shaping the budget, and what it will take for the Navy to make some of its most ambitious warfighting concepts a reality. 

The Navy is at an inflection point as it conducts force structure assessments to determine what the future fleet may look like, including along the lines of an integrated force that more closely involves the Marines. How do you view the challenges of force structure assessment and fleet design in this modern age of rapid change?

Force structure assessments should be based on some form of analysis of steady-state and wartime capability requirements that uses specific types of units to meet these requirements, and that uses a specific set of military objectives to be achieved, and a concept of operations for the units’ employment against specific threats when doing so. If the design of the force is stable and the characteristics and employment concepts of its units are mature, this is a pretty straightforward task. That is not where the Navy is today.

When major changes in unit characteristics and force employment concepts are underway but have not yet stabilized and the threat is evolving rapidly, the task of doing a force structure assessment that produces specific provable numbers as the “requirement” for each type of unit becomes an unbounded problem. That is the situation the Navy is in today. It does not help that the whole process has become politicized and that the Navy is operating with a force structure requirement number that is unaffordable with current ship types, but is being told that the number must be achieved anyway, and soon. Force structure assessments are actually a set of about ten separate assessments of the requirements for that many different specific types of ships, so the aggregate number of 355 or whatever is misleading. If a requirement for 62 submarines is part of the 355 and the Navy has 42, but has 20 extra ships of some other type above the requirement for that type, the aggregate fleet number may be 355 but it is not the right fleet. That nuance is lost in the political process.

Until the new types of units and concepts of operations for these units are decided upon that will best meet our projected warfare challenges, including the newest one of operating as an “integrated” force with the Marines as they implement their new Commandant’s brilliant and disruptive force-planning guidance, it would be nice if the Navy could stop throwing force structure assessment numbers around. It would be ideal, although probably politically unrealistic, to take a pause in such assessments while a whole new design for the future fleet is worked out in detail. This could and should have been done over the last three years since the last force structure assessment, but it was not because the amount of change required was simply too disruptive for the institutional Navy to handle at that time. I think it is underway now, finally, but it will take a couple of years to settle out to the point where a force structure assessment is meaningful.

The Navy is looking to move toward a Distributed Maritime Operations concept for how it employs its forces. What do you make of this warfighting concept, and what could it take the Navy to get there?

Operating as an aggregated and concentrated force against an adversary like China with a massive long-range precision reconnaissance-strike system is not a survivable concept. Distributing the force is essential, but the distributed units need to be able to support each other and concentrate their effects when and where necessary. This requires a significant degree of connectivity and data movement between units at beyond-line-of-sight ranges, in an environment where the adversary is attacking that networking capability as their principal line of military effort. If a distributed force is not connected, it will be defeated in detail.

The concept for executing this connectivity is the “naval tactical grid” or whatever the equivalent joint term of the moment may be. It means everybody can communicate what they need to, when they need to. This aspiration began with Vice Admiral Art Cebrowski’s FORCEnet concept in the 1990s, but it has not made the implementation progress that it should have. Engineering this without ripping out every radio on every unit and starting over is really hard technically, and expensive. Nobody wants to own and pay this bill. Enforcing conformance of all systems and units to common and truly interoperable data and communications protocols is very difficult organizationally. But until we do both, distributed operations will not work very well. Achieving this connectivity vision is as disruptive a change as changing the design of the units that make up the fleet, and this is another change that I do not think is going on at the pace that is appropriate to the strategic situation we are in.

You served as the Navy’s Chief Analyst for 12 years at the Assessment Division, OPNAV N81. During that time you sought to change the relationship N81 had with other organizations, namely from being a so-called “honest broker” and more toward an analytics service provider. What exactly does this change mean and what effect did it have on those relationships?

This operating model that I built for the Navy’s analytic enterprise during my 12 years was dismantled after I retired, so my comments on how it used to work are not too relevant anymore. The Navy’s analytic resources are no longer concentrated in N81, they have been distributed back across many sponsors who are now largely on their own to conceive and execute whatever analysis they think they need, subject to some review of the proposed topics by the Navy Analytic Office. This is essentially a return to the situation of the 1990s. No other Service today operates their analytic enterprise in this manner. N81 is no longer a “service provider” of analysis to other sponsors, although they remain the only Navy line organization with professionally-trained operations analysts who know how to conduct and supervise analytic projects, and the only organization that does not own the programs that it analyzes.

The freedom from program ownership lets N81 be a “dispassionate” analyst of capabilities. I never liked the phrase “honest broker” to characterize this, because it implies that all others are “dishonest,” which is simply not true. But a dispassionate provider may not choose to analyze issues that are not going to drive major areas of force capability, and the answers provided may not be those that the sponsor with the issue wants to hear. Both of these factors made the N81 service provider model a bit unpopular.

In recent years the OPNAV staff saw some restructuring that sought to give the strategists a greater ability to provide inputs into developing the budget, and where before the strategists were often viewed as relatively weak influencers when it came to developing budget builds. How do you see the evolving relationship between strategy inputs and the POM process?

“Strategy” is the purview of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs and the Secretary of Defense, not the individual services. What the services call “strategy” and own is the concepts of force employment that they plan to use in execution of the strategy. The Navy’s strategic expression that counts is the budget it builds that funds and delivers specific forces and capabilities. That determines what the Navy can do, and more importantly what it cannot do. Navy strategists have generally been unable to articulate timely guidance that made strategic choices about what to not do in order to focus the available resources on the most critical things that must be done. When resources are constrained, you cannot have one without the other. Their guidance said everything was important, few things could be cut, and it usually came out late, so far into the POM-development timeline that funding decisions had already been made. Time, tides, and POMs wait for no man.

Recent CNO guidance documents from the Navy strategists have been better than I have seen for several decades, but they still cannot seem to bear to identify the full scale of things to not do in order to maximize the strategic contribution of the Navy within actually available resources. In the end, if strategists cannot make such hard calls on the relentless POM timeline, then programmers must. It has typically been the job of N81 to use results from analysis to help the programmers make these calls; that is why I found working in N81 so professionally rewarding and why having it within N8 was so important to the Navy. Unfortunately, the current political imperatives of sustaining and even increasing force structure size without a corresponding top line increase have limited the effect of strategic focus and analysis on what actually gets funded in the POM.

There is debate on how well wargaming has been employed to inform decision-making, particularly with respect to analytic rigor and ownership. How could wargaming evolve to have greater analytic clout within DoD?

Wargaming can have a distinct and important role in shaping the Navy’s direction, particularly in times of disruptive and rapid technological change, such as we are now in. If wargames are structured in a disciplined manner with realistic assumptions about event timing, logistic feasibility, threat behavior, and technology; are focused on the most critical issues; and have the right participants, they can be very useful. They can provide insights about which courses of action, technologies and concepts of employment are promising, and which are unlikely to work in a specific scenario. Wargames are human-in-the-loop activities whose outcomes change with each set of humans that do them, they are not rigorous repeatable analysis. Their best role is to shape the assumptions that are used by quantitative analysis before that analysis is applied against new operational problems. This analysis should then ideally be tested through operational experimentation that puts hardware (real or virtual) in the loop to see if things work out the way as predicted.

This “virtuous cycle” of wargame-analyze-experiment is the ideal way to design a force, but each step of this cycle is today owned and operated by a different organization, and it is fairly rare that the full cycle is actually executed in a coherent, end-to-end manner on a specific operational challenge. It takes time, focus, and patience to achieve this end-to-end coherence, and with organizational leadership rotations being what they are in the U.S. military, this is hard to do. There are a few areas where this happens fairly well, such as in air and missile defense, but the Joint and Navy future-force planning processes could and should do this more broadly and better.

You once described your role as N81B as not necessarily being focused on the specific analytic techniques being employed, but on being the expert on what is worth studying. Among the many demands for studies and analysis across the Navy, how does one determine what is truly worth studying?

Uniquely within the Navy the N81 staff knows how to structure an issue into an analytic problem, how to select the appropriate techniques to apply to it, and how to either do the work themselves or find the right outside provider to apply those techniques. My job (and that of the admirals who were my bosses in N81) was really to have as many interactions with senior leaders as possible and pay close attention to the bigger picture of what Navy leadership was trying to achieve, what the key problems were in getting there, where they needed (whether they knew it or not) analysis to help them understand the value or risk of the alternatives before them, and what analysis had been done before on that issue.

Senior leaders often do not know how to break a problem down into specific issues where analytic techniques can be applied, nor what issues have been studied before. That is really not their job anyway; that is what they expect a “Chief Analyst” to be able to do. I saw it as my job to recognize and make that connection, then bring back to the N81 staff the key new issues to go work their analytic skills on. Fairly regularly I initiated analytic projects in anticipation of issues that I saw coming months in advance. My experience of being deeply involved in 26 POM cycles in the Pentagon gave me pretty good intuition about what issues were likely to be coming up.

The issues worth studying are the ones that will potentially have a significant impact on warfighting outcomes or on the cost of buying, operating, or maintaining the force; and that are susceptible to analysis. Many issues are interesting, some are important, and some of the important ones are not really amenable to analytic techniques. It was N81’s job when I was there, and it is now instead the Navy Analytic Office’s job to recognize which was which.

Arthur H. (Trip) Barber is a retired Navy Senior Executive Service civilian, a retired Navy Surface Warfare Captain, and an engineering graduate of MIT and the Naval Postgraduate School. He was the Navy’s chief analyst of future force structure and capability requirements on the OPNAV staff as a civilian from 2002 to 2014.

Dmitry Filipoff is CIMSEC’s Director of Online Content. Contact him at Content@cimsec.org.

Featured Image: PACIFIC OCEAN (Jan. 25, 2020) The Theodore Roosevelt Carrier Strike Group transits in formation, Jan. 25, 2020. The Theodore Roosevelt Carrier Strike Group is on a scheduled deployment to the Indo-Pacific. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Anthony Rivera/Released)

Fostering the Discussion on Securing the Seas.